Here is a poem from my manuscript that’s currently a finalist for the Sundog Poetry Book Award. (I was also a finalist last year.) Winning it would mean I would have a book published. Fingers crossed. And toes. Also hairs.
Sleep, Winter This is what your winter will bring. You sing to the constellations. You sing Yourself to sleep. Good books unsettle you, Said my high school teacher whose life Was less poetry than he intended. I sleep In winter the way a man sleeps Next to his lover. Cool brow, hot heart. I sleep with the snow in my mouth As my brother. My love, in sleep, Throws his body like the rain Throws quenching at earth. Baby, What melts in me is what makes me Young. Turn towards me. I have solace To share. The truth is in the two of us Scraping butter on toast in a kitchen Christened by dawn. The snake makes An S in the grass but the grass is not a story For now. For now the story is only How we intertwined Before the snake showed us her shape.
In other news, I’ve been thinking a lot about this line lately:
“If I love you, I love you. And if I love you and duck it, I die.”
- James Baldwin, in this interview with Toni Morrison
James (Jimmy!) says this in response to Toni being like, So Jimmy, people are always asking you about being a homosexual. You could tell she couldn’t care less about the question personally, but since everyone else was so focused on it, she felt like she had to bring it up. First, he corrects the common grammatical use of the word “homosexual” (love it), and then says, “If I love you, I love you. And if I love you and duck it, I die.”
I like how his response brings loving to the bodily level. To the level of life and (or) death:
If we deny ourselves what we need.
If we deny ourselves our pleasure.
If we deny ourselves of our right to feel.
If we deny ourselves of ourselves—we die.
We don’t remain here if that is what we are doing. We may still be in physical form here, but our full selves are not here when we duck who or what we love; we are half-gone, we are under-realized, we are unjustly repentant; we are putting off the expression of our true selves until a later point that will never come; we are out of alignment. If we love you and we duck it, we die. We die off, little by little, probably, first. And then we fully die.
I think of this in terms of queerness, yes, but also in terms of denying elements of ourselves in all realms.
I also think about this in terms of who I love. Do I love The Best People Out There? Do the people I love Deserve To Be Loved? I don’t know, probably not, who’s to say? But the people I love…I love them. There’s no use trying to stop that, even when it is painful to love them.
And loving people is painful. It’s not lovey all the time. And loving the wrong people is real. But I think for most of us, it’s not that we love the wrong people, it’s that people are hard to love, and people are always doing things wrong and hurting people, including us. And we hurt our people, sometimes, too! But we can’t just duck them. If we duck who we love, we are ducking ourselves. We are ducking our work in the world. We can’t sidestep loving like it’s some dance move we can learn later. There is no later. We gotta dance, now.
I was also knocked sideways by Joy Harjo this week:
“be who you are, even if it kills you.
it will. over and over again
even as you live.”
- Joy Harjo, from the poem “Break My Heart”
Wait, so it’s gonna kill us to be ourselves?? But Jimmy asserted that it would kill us to NOT be ourselves!! I guess it’s like Misha always says: “The opposite is also true.”
Being who we are in a world that wants us to be like everyone else is work. It’s not like we can just turn the tap on and let our truest selves flow out like some natural resource. Being who we are requires a sort of constant vigilance. It asks us to continually find a center in a world of endless edges.
But there’s no joy in being someone else, and there’s the potential for great joy in being ourselves. So we may as well try, right?
I’ll do another newsletter about what I’ve been reading soon. Stay tuned. Stay loving.
Dancing,
Taylor
I'm confused - is this the usual place you submit your poems and musings or is this new? Does this mean I won't hear you read your poetry, which I love the most.
And, I love this because it's you and that poem is a knockout, and yes, I'm rooting for you. Let all of us know immediately when you hear about your collection!
Very good Taylor, thank you. Love this line,
"It asks us to continually find a center in a world of endless edges."